Brexit Makes the U.S. the Last, Best Hope for Liberalism

Proponents of Britain’s remaining in the European Union react to the results of Thursday’s referendum, which saw a majority of Britons vote to exit the E.U.

Photograph by Finbarr Webster / REX via AP

The map showing the results of the United Kingdom’s vote to exit the European Union was stark. There was a bright bulb of support for Remain in and around London, where sixty per cent of voters supported the status quo. Across the rest of England, the vote was to leave. In the northwest and the West Midlands, analysts suggested that the arrival of migrants had antagonized voters; in the northeast, the decline of mining and manufacturing was said to be the cause; in Wales, no one was really sure. Scotland and Northern Ireland, where voters were less moved by nationalist appeals, preferred to remain, and now the question is whether Scottish politicians will renew last year’s effort to sever their own ties with the U.K. But in England, the dividing line seemed clear: there was London, and then there was everywhere else.

Earlier this week, the BBC televised a debate at Wembley Stadium between the leaders of the Remain and Leave movements. The polls were then tilting back toward Remain (and even a YouGov poll, released as the polls closed, suggested that voters had narrowly chosen to stay). Boris Johnson, the conservative provocateur who led the Leave campaign, in opposition to both major parties, did not make a case so much as generate an atmosphere of hype and nationalism. While Johnson insisted that leaving the E.U. would restore British manufacturing to its former glory, Sadiq Khan, the new Labour Mayor of London, read out a quote from Johnson’s own economic adviser, conceding that a successful Leave vote would cost England manufacturing jobs. The victors seemed obvious, and the Brexit movement, when one watched the polls, appeared to be a fever that was abating.

But when the vote came in, it turned out that even parts of the English heartland that vote reliably for Labour had moved under the nationalist banner, prompting two of the Party’s Members of Parliament to submit a no-confidence motion in their leader, Jeremy Corbyn. More arrestingly, outside of London and, perhaps, Birmingham and the university towns, support for liberalism appeared to have evaporated almost altogether. Sheffield, which is represented by the former Liberal Democratic leader Nick Clegg (whose Party advances “the ideology of bicyclists,” as a Labour leader once put it to David Remnick), voted to leave. So did Doncaster, which is represented by the former Labour leader Ed Miliband. Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, who agreed to the referendum in a gamble to assure his election last year, announced that he would step down in October; the early betting had Johnson as the likeliest candidate to replace him.

With Trump in mind, the American white-nationalist Richard Spencer claimed on Twitter this morning that the Leave vote had been underrepresented in polls because of a version of the Bradley effect, in which people had not been willing to confess to pollsters the nationalism in their hearts. A less alarming way to view the results would be that the reach of pragmatic social liberalism, in this vote in England, did not seem to extend far beyond the wealthy and the cosmopolitan at all. There was a constituency for the kind of liberalism that has seemed predominant in the quarter century since Bill Clinton and Tony Blair—globalist and committed to free markets, while also dedicated to the project of social justice—but it wasn’t an especially large one. It was one vote, in one peculiar set of circumstances, but it was enough to introduce a flicker of doubt into a matter that had seemed mostly settled.

The question this ultimately raises is whether nationalism is really the fever and liberalism the normal condition, or whether it might be the other way around. In France, Nicolas Sarkozy’s party of the center-right and Marine Le Pen’s party of the nationalist far-right are leading early polling for next year’s Presidential election, with the parties of the left and center-left trailing well behind. In the U.K., the majority of voters now appear to be more nationalist than David Cameron’s Tories were. The Tories have become Boris Johnson’s party, and even further to the right there is the ascendant United Kingdom Independence Party. The worry is that liberalism may be winning the ideas festivals and losing the elections. The left still exists, at least in some form, but liberals seem endangered. Not long ago, we thought the reverse was true.

Stateside, Hillary Clinton’s candidacy has felt the same pinch, and this led to an unexpected inversion. The Democrats have become the party of vocal American exceptionalism. This is partly a direct response to Donald Trump’s paranoid claims that the United States is a “third-world country” and the subject of collective global mockery. But it’s also the case that, against the nationalism rising across Europe and at home, American liberalism does look more isolated, and more singular. “We’re still, in Lincoln’s words, the last, best hope of earth,” Clinton insisted, in a speech denouncing Trump, in San Diego, early this month. Or at least, the last best hope of liberalism. One irony of Clinton’s candidacy is that she is projecting a globalism not obviously shared by others around the globe—not even by America’s most traditional ally. The liberal project is increasingly an American one.